The Internet, and especially the World Wide Web (“web”), has made vast amounts of information available to users through their Internet browsers. Although this information is easily accessible to users, there is so much information that it presents problems as users try to identify what information is relevant to their needs. This problem has been referred to as the information explosion problem. Search engine services have been developed to help users find information that is relevant to their needs. These search engine services allow users to search for display pages, such as web pages, that may be of interest to users. After a user submits a search request (i.e., a query) that includes search terms, the search engine service identifies web pages that may be related to those search terms. To quickly identify related web pages, the search engine services may maintain a mapping of keywords to web pages. This mapping may be generated by crawling the web to identify the keywords of each web page. To crawl the web, a search engine service may use a list of root web pages to identify all web pages that are accessible through those root web pages. The keywords of any particular web page can be identified using various well-known information retrieval techniques, such as identifying the words of a headline, the words supplied in the metadata of the web page, the words that are highlighted, and so on. The search engine service identifies web pages that may be related to the search request based on how well the keywords of a web page match the words of the query. The search engine service then displays to the user links to the identified web pages in an order that is based on a ranking that may be determined by their relevance to the query, popularity, importance, and/or some other measure.
After the search results are displayed to the user, the user can click on a link of the search results to view the content of a web page. The web page, however, may or may not contain the information in which the user is interested. Users will often flip quickly between different web pages and different search results to visually compare the different information of the web pages and the search results to find the information of interest. Since browsers conventionally display each search result and web page in a different window, this flipping involves selecting windows from a history list, selecting backward and forward buttons, selecting separate instances of the browser, and various combinations of such selecting.
Recent implementations of browsers have partially made this flipping task less arduous by providing a tabbed document interface (“TDI”). A TDI allows multiple documents (e.g., web pages) to be stored as separate tabs inside a single browser window. With a TDI, each tab has a tab name portion and a tab content portion. The tab name portion contains identifying information for the tab (e.g., text of a query), and the tab content portion contains the content of a web page (e.g., search results for the query). When a user clicks on a tab (e.g., selecting the tab name portion), the tab content window with the content of the web page is displayed. Users can click on tabs in quick succession to visually rotate between the different web pages to find information that is of interest. Even though a TDI makes the process of flipping through the web pages easier, it is still difficult for a user to compare the information provided by one web page to that provided by another web page. The task of making a detailed comparison between web pages is laborious and non-intuitive because the user needs to review one web page and remember its content while flipping to and viewing another web page.